chronophobia
by Ten-Faced
Summary: :oh, for eternal life and youth / but I do not care for eternity: RinxRei, based on the song. Gift fic for solitaryloner.


Warning: Does not make sense. If there are any complaints about such in the review, the author shall simply ignore that portion. Meant to be abstract.

Based on Rin's song _Chronophobia_. I own nothing. For solitaryloner, who was probably expecting something a whole lot different when she challenged me. Ah, well, you introduced me to the song, so I can only blame you.

RinxRei because that's my second favourite Rin pairing and because Rei looks like the boy in the mv.

EDIT: Thanks to _Honeycloud of Riverclan_ for the correction!

* * *

_~\chronophobia/~_

* * *

When she opened her eyes she saw a flow of sand, fine as flour and soft as silk, all falling down from an opening above her head. She looked around and found an invisible barrier that she could see around her, noticeable because of the glint defining the curved shape of a cylindrical glass that was around her.

Next to her flowers lay, bouquets and single blossoms and corsages all half-buried under sand; the visible petals and stems and leaves dusted with the fine sand.

It fell on her and yet it didn't quite stick to her body, the way normal sand should have. Maybe it wasn't normal sand, because she knew no normal sand glowed like that with the soft light. No normal sand made the sounds of ticks like clocks – but perhaps that wasn't the sand, but the clocks placed in the room beyond her little glass barrier.

. . .

**_Shall we tell you a story? _**

The hum was not spoken aloud but she heard the words and knew that the source of the question had been the sands. Was this all a dream? Was she going crazy like that girl Alice?

She nodded without understanding the consequences of her choice.

. . .

A baby screamed as the doctor took him in his arms and told his panting mother of the happy news, how she had a healthy baby boy now. A child laughed at a story her father told her, complete with comical facial expressions and voices oddly pitched for amusement. A man got onto his knees and asked for his true love's hand in marriage. An old man went on a slow walk across the park.

. . .

_"C'mon," a childish laugh, one belonging to a child who played innocent games, who knew nothing about the world except for the safe bubble of family and the seemingly-eternal time it took for his next birthday to come. One that didn't belong to him because he couldn't possibly have been any of those things. "Can't you see all these people? Can't you stop this?"_

. . .

A five-year old boy cried in the dark, dank basements of a stranger who had forcibly taken him off the streets on his way home, scared that the man might come back to hurt him again. A girl barely at the age of fourteen held the sheets around her tightly as her unborn baby – embryo - was removed from her body. A youth about to enter manhood gripped at his hair with trembling, blood-stained hands as he looked at the lifeless body of the prostitute. A man chose to raise his knife to the throat of his hostage and was immediately shot by seven different police officers. An old woman wailed bitterly as her son's empty casket was lowered into the freshly dug hole with the gravestone telling the world of a sad tale where a soldier's body was never recovered.

. . .

_"What do you see?" a naïve, genuinely curious question._

_Her hands tightened. Why did he do this? "Stop it."_

_"What do you see?" he asked insistently._

_"Stop it!"_

_"You see it all, right? All the good and the bad . . . don't you love the good? Don't you want the bad gone? Why don't you do anything? Are you evil? You're not, right? You're a good person, right?"_

_Black and white and good and evil and-_

_Views of a child looking at a world, eyes not yet tired with the cruel things humans could do, the hypocrisy of it all, the vague grayness of morals and the time, let's not forget the time that flowed and made everything change for better or worse-_

_Mostly worse, though._

_"Stop it!"_

. . .

They were all stories on their own. They had their prologues, their chapters, their epilogues. Maybe there were sequels or prequels, a few side stories with a crossover of some sort.

She didn't know. All she saw were those small bits as the sand that wasn't sand dribbled over her. Each grain that touched her showed her a small fragment of a story. A girl, a boy, a man, a woman, a broken soul, an innocent being . . . .

Moments that was the highlights of a story of a life.

Sometimes they were happy. She almost smiled at them, the ones with cheer and fortune and gifts and blessings. Almost.

Sometimes they were content stories. One where there were successes and victories that could wipe out any negative influences around them, let the story be upbeat the entire time.

Sometimes they were bittersweet. A thing that could have been, maybe a few bland mixes of general average life. Some success, failure that overshadowed much of the light and a weaving melody to the trickle of sand.

Sometimes . . . many times, they were devastating. Misfortune after misfortune, death and disease and starvation and isolation and misery of such a scale she wanted nothing to do with all those highlighting key points of trauma defining and changing the course of the person's life. Murders. Rapes. Losses. Deaths. Tortures.

But time marched on cruelly with a machine-like efficiency with the ticking and tiny clicking of clockwork in the clocks around her keeping tempo.

. . .

_"It's all for you," he promised, radiating sincerity. _

. . .

She'd been in this room for a very long time. She knew the details of this room, the beautiful light that glowed softly everywhere without a visible source, the three hundred and sixty five clocks of various shapes and sizes that provided the sounds of time and the large hourglass at the centre of it all with a never-ending flow of sand.

The beautiful calming light was a deception that would tear her shields down. The clocks were crueller than any villain from her fragment stories with their never-ending chants of worship and devotion to time. The hourglass with the never-ending sands trickling down was her prison and her own torture device.

She curled up half-heartedly when a particularly violent story came up, trying to shield herself from the sand that completely surrounded her. Her barrier, her safeguard was the pink stuffed rabbit that her captor had given her, an act of kindness that had triggered the evil curse on her. It was something that never could be destroyed as long as she lived, a constant reminder to keep her torture going.

She hated this. She hated time.

. . .

There was once a boy. He had lived a very, very long time and he was bored of seeing the same boring stories and repetitive patterns all over again.

Let it be known that it was seeing it he was tired of. If he'd been the one presenting it . . . why, it would have been much better!

He wanted to be the scriptwriter. He wanted to make his own stories.

. . .

Time was when the sadist began to count the seconds a mother's daughter had left in her life as she was slowly lowered into the meat grinder.

Time was what the parents wanted as they ran around desperately searching for non-existent food while their child slowly stopped breathing.

Time was why stress began to take its toll on the people from the children watching their fighting parents to the seniors in retirements, to the pregnant women to the busy businessman.

Time was where nothing was safe or eternal. Where everything existed and died out all at the same time.

Time was no one's slave and everyone's master.

. . .

_"I brought you a present," he sang in his sing-song voice. _

. . .

A knife and a pink stuffed rabbit on top of all the flowers that never quite wilted fully.

She'd often tried to end it all by slashing at herself. It had never worked within her hourglass prison of time.

. . .

_"Time heals all wounds."_

_"You may be time but you don't heal all the wounds!"_

_"But, but," he said, eager to teach a new thing to someone. "you don't have any wounds on you! Time healed you!"_

. . .

She screamed and tried to shatter the glass with the knife. It didn't work.

. . .

_"Break it, break it!" he chanted and there was a glint to his eyes that spoke of boyish mischief not yet smothered by time. He wanted to fit in, he wanted to follow the 'popular' thing to do and he thought it would be cool so he encouraged her to do something that would be considered 'vandalism'. "It looks so much better broken, doesn't it?_

_And because he clearly thought that he needed to further support her, he added, "Everything does."_

. . .

The boy saw a girl. She had golden hair and blue eyes and she was pretty. She was like a princess.

Every story needed a princess. He took her for his.

. . .

_"I'm not afraid of you!" she screamed and tried to believe in her desperate words._

_He grinned, looking friendly. "I don't want you to be."_

. . .

The bomb squad members were all killed in the blast when the time ran out on the bomb sitting in the middle of the elevator.

A man hanging onto the edge of a cliff couldn't hold on any longer and slipped.

A girl made a few hesitant attempts of cutting at her wrist, wincing at the pain, until her eyes hardened with resolve and she made the fatal swipe.

. . .

_The boy thought – actually had the gall to think – that she liked this. Liked the thought of living in this glass prison forever and ever for all eternity with only him as her companion._

_"Let me go," she said, trying to reason even if her mind was tired. So tired . . . . how long had it been? "Let me go."_

_"I can't do that," he said, so matter-of-factly she wanted to cry._

_She didn't shed a single tear or let a single sob escape her throat and pass her lips. "Why not?"_

_He stopped twiddling his thumbs. "Because the moon is still in the sky. Because people still live and laugh and die and cry. Because time goes on everywhere!"_

_"Let me go!" she screamed._

_The boy laughed and the sound of it was so innocent she screamed again._

. . .

The story would be wonderful. A normal boy would be with a lovely princess and they'd live forever and ever, being happy and grand and fantastic.

He thought it would be a nice story. Happy and content and peaceful and together for all of eternity.

He thought that the princess he had chosen would like it. Her hair would be forever golden, her blue eyes forever sharp and sparkling with the essence of youth.

They would be blessed by time, blessed and unthreatened as they lived with each other, together, superior to the others who did not have their good fortune.

He thought it was a nice story.

. . .

_"I hate you!"_

. . .

She snapped at last.

. . .

_His smile disappeared. "You don't mean that."_

_"I do. I hate you. I hate time, I hate this, I hate everything!"_

_"You can't hate," he said, slowly and softly, trying to tell himself this wasn't happening. "You're a princess."_

_She smashed at the glass and he jerked back, surprised. "I hate you!"_

_"You can't hate me," he insisted. "We're together for all eternity."_

_"SCREW ETERNITY!"_

_"You don't care for it?" But why? Others would jump at the chance to be immortal and young forever . . . didn't she know what he was doing by placing her within the sands of time?_

_"I HATE YOU!"_

. . .

How many had bargained with a god to try and win the losing battle against time? How many had begged for more, for extended periods, for a little bit extra? How many had fought and spent their precious time on their fruitless search for a lengthened life, more time to be spent breathing and thinking and living?

He'd seen all those and he'd seen beauty wither away, washed over and over by the waves of time until the once-smooth skin wrinkled and wits dulled down to a blunt, dumb point. He'd seen memory fade and senses begin to fail and bodies shut down and break down.

He had thought she would love eternity.

. . .

_According to one clock it had been five minutes. By another's hands it was a year. _

_Either way the boy spoke again after a certain period of time passed. "Why?"_

_"Why I hate you?" she wanted to cry but she couldn't let tears fall so she just sobbed with a dry face, sounding strangled and feeling pressure in her face as blood rushed to her head. "Isn't that obvious?"_

_"Why don't you care for eternity?"_

_He sounded heartbroken._

_He had no right to be heartbroken. All that time – despite her hate for it – he had taken from her for some selfish purpose disguised as charity and he thought now he could feel sorry for his miserable little self?_

_"It's no use to me," she spat as cruelly as she could and fruitlessly smashed her fist against the glass for good measure._

. . .

Here was a new story, written by two different people.

Once, there was a boy who wanted to have a beautiful princess as a friend. Because he had black hair and golden eyes he thought that a princess should have golden hair and blue eyes because that was what all the beauties were supposed to look like in stories where all the good guys were happy in the end.

He took a girl who was a princess in his eyes and kept her safe. He placed her in a place safe from the sad, devastating, evil forces of disease, age, death, pain and time because he wanted her to stay the same way forever.

He thought he was protecting her.

Once, there was a girl who followed a boy because he said he'd be her prince charming and she believed him. He placed her in a large hourglass where she was haunted with dreams and stories of others, and not all of them were picture perfect fairytales.

Nearly driven insane, she fell in hate with anything and everything, lashing out because she was devastated and angry and so, so tired of it all. She never once wished for immortality, for eternity to be real to her and yet the boy who had told her that he'd be a prince for her had forced it upon her.

She thought he was torturing her.

. . .

_"Let's start over," the boy suggested after he saw how sad he had made his princess._

. . .

**But time doesn't work that way.**


End file.
